Information for staff

Your chance to help shape the future of hospital services in South Yorkshire Bassetlaw and Chesterfield

You may be aware that healthcare professionals across South Yorkshire, Bassetlaw and Chesterfield are coming together with patients and the public to help shape how hospital services could be delivered in the future to ensure local people continue to get safe, sustainable, high quality care.

The first step will be to look at how current hospital services are provided and what needs to happen to future proof them, taking into account local and national issues such as rising demand, workforce and resource challenges and consistently delivering quality standards.

The aim will be to ensure patients and local communities have access to appropriate, safe, high quality care and that improved ways of working are developed to ensure existing staff are retained as well as hospitals being able to attract the best possible staff in the future.

The work will not look at closing any of the current general hospitals in South Yorkshire, Bassetlaw or Chesterfield. It is however about making sure we can retain the excellent professionals we have working in our local hospitals and at the same time explore new ways of working to create opportunities which put us in the best position to attract staff moving forward.

The decision to work collectively across South Yorkshire, Bassetlaw and Chesterfield has been taken to ensure that it is local healthcare professionals like you and your colleagues along with the public and patients that drive changes moving forward and that we have services tailored to local needs.

The detailed work that will begin this week (27 October 2017) will explore how five services could be delivered to ensure local people have access to safe, high quality care provided by the most appropriate healthcare professional and in the best place.

The services are: urgent and emergency care; maternity services; hospital services for children who are particularly ill; services for stomach and intestines conditions (gastroenterology), including investigations (endoscopy); and stroke (early supported discharge and rehabilitation). The decision to review these five services follows conversations with the public, senior clinicians and detailed examination of information about these services including patient and staff experience of the services and other underpinning data.

The work will be independently led by a former Vascular Consultant and Yorkshire and Humber Clinical Senate Chair Professor Chris Welsh, who spent many years delivering care in our region.

As someone who works in NHS services, you will no doubt see things every day that you think could deliver better care if done in another way. The review gives us the chance to explore some of these opportunities. You will also be well aware of the problems we face in many services around staffing and an increasing demand for services. The review will take all these things into consideration and look at how services could be provided so that everyone in South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw has equal access to high quality, safe hospital services now and into the future.

The views of you and your colleagues will be essential in designing services for the future. You can get involved in a number of ways:

Give your views via your colleagues who will sit on the relevant clinical workshops. The workshop attendees will be tasked with taking the key points from each of the meetings back to their services to seek the wider views of their colleagues. This is to ensure that any recommendations have the full input of the people who provide the services.

The work gets underway this week and is just one part of a wider programme of work across Health and Care Working Together in South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw, which is now an Accountable Care System (ACS) and one of the first in the country.

If you have any questions on the review please see our Question and Answer sheet below.